News & Events: HIV-positive organ donation

Arya Zarinsefat, M.D., a UCSF general surgery resident and research fellow in the Sarwal Lab, has been awarded a prestigious UCSF-Gladstone Center For AIDS Research (CFAR) Mentored Scientist Award.  Dr. Zarinsefat's research will focus on better understanding the genes and process of rejection in kidney transplantation of HIV-infected recipients. The study will apply an innovative method of discovering rejection in HIV-infected kidney transplants by performing DNA cytosine methylation sequencing of plasma samples of individuals with rejection. Methyl-Seq is a novel next-generation [...]

Simon N. Chu, M.S., a 4th Year UCSF medical student and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow in the laboratory of Qizhi Tang, Ph.D., has been awarded the 2019 Association for Academic Surgery Outstanding Medical Student Award at the 14th Annual Academic Surgical Congress held in Houston, Texas on February 5-7, 2019. Chu is co-mentored by transplant surgeon Peter G. Stock, M.D., Ph.D. Chu is also a member of the PRIME Program in Medicine for the Urban Underserved. Chu was selected to compete in the Association's national medical student oral abstract presentation competition. [...]

Simon N. Chu, M.S., has been awarded the 2018 Dean's Prize in Research and Scholarship by the UCSF School of Medicine for his molecular medicine research. Chu, a senior medical student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Research Fellow, will present his research on the immune response following transplantation in the HIV infected recipient at the upcoming 2018 Inquiry Symposium on Wed. May 2nd at the Milberry Gym on the Parnassus campus between 10:00 am and 11:30 am.  The symposium showcases award-winning research from the four UCSF [...]

President Barack Obama signs the HOPE Act legislation in November 2013. Peter Stock (far left) had earlier testified before Congress in support of the legislation, which overturned a federal ban on HIV-to-HIV transplants. Photo by Evan Vucci UCSF News reports on the epic battle, led by UCSF transplant surgeon Peter G. Stock, M.D., Ph.D., to repeal long-standing federal and state laws banning HIV-to-HIV organ transplantation, this after having served as lead Principal Investigator on a landmark clinical trial demonstrating the feasibility and clinical benefit of such transplants, and, in [...]

President Barack Obama signs S. 330: HIV Organ Policy Equity Act during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Nov. 21, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) MSNBC reports on President Obama's signing of  a bill that ended a decades-old policy that banned organ donations from one HIV-positive person to another. A clinical trial led by UCSF transplant surgeon Peter G. Stock, M.D., Ph.D. was instrumental to the passage of the Hope Act that lifted the ban. The HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act allows organ transplants between HIV-infected individuals for medical research [...]

Last year, a team led by Dr. Peter Stock of UCSF reported on results from a large multicenter study testing the safety and feasibility of transplanting kidneys where both the donor and recipients were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The results, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the recipients survived nearly as long as non-HIV infected recipients of kidney transplants. As a result of the Stock-led trial, and a just-published paper from Johns Hopkins projecting that 500 to 600 H.I.V.-infected livers and kidneys would become available each year if the [...]

"People infected with the AIDS virus can safely receive a kidney transplant, researchers reported on Wednesday. The finding, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, is good news for people with HIV who are more prone to kidney disease, in part because of the drugs they must take to stay healthy. Before drug cocktails turned HIV from a death sentence to a chronic condition, patients were not eligible to receive a kidney. But now they can. 'Patient and graft survival are really pretty good and it approximates the general population,' Dr. Peter Stock of the University of [...]